The Philosophy of Kant (NP 101)

The purpose of this paper is to enable you to make a critical study of some of the ideas of one of the greatest of all philosophers.

Immanuel Kant lived from 1724 to 1804. He published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. The Critique is his greatest work and, without question, the most influential work of modern philosophy. It is a difficult but enormously rewarding work. This is largely because Kant, perhaps uniquely, combines in the highest measure the cautious qualities of care, rigour and tenacity with the bolder quality of philosophical imagination. Its concern is to give an account of human knowledge that will steer a path between the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics and the scepticism that, Kant believes, is the inevitable result of the empiricist criticism of metaphysics. Kant’s approach, he claims in a famous metaphor, amounts to a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Instead of looking at human knowledge by starting from what is known, we should start from ourselves as knowing subjects and ask how the world must be for us to have the kind of knowledge and experience that we have. Kant thinks that his Copernican revolution also enables him to reconcile traditional Christian morality and modern science, in the face of their apparently irreconcilable demands (in the one case, that we should be free agents, and in the other case, that the world should be governed by inexorable mechanical laws).

In the Groundwork Kant develops his very distinctive and highly influential moral philosophy. He argues that morality is grounded in reason. What we ought to do is what we would do if we acted in a way that was purely rational. To act in a way that is purely rational is to act in accordance with the famous “categorical imperative”, which Kant expresses as follows: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Texts: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans, H.J. Paton (Hutchinson). Roger Scruton, Kant.